On reconsidering our audience, getting the house in order, and ideas that exhaust
June 6, 2019
Dear Eva,
As I embark on my 36th public letter to you, I find that I am pondering the publicness of our exchange. I guess, in some sense, I am questioning it. It feels to me like we could be doing this project on some private password-protected site, and I would feel just the same as I do about it now. I am writing to you, my dear friend Eva, and it only vaguely crosses my mind that a few other souls may occasionally read the words, too. I wrote once about how maybe this is a form of practicing our public voices in some small way, but today I am wondering why I ever thought I wanted or needed a public voice in the first place. I have been thinking lately that maybe the core problem of the internet is that we (as in, humans generally) haven’t understood what it means to be [potentially] talking to everyone, that we can convince ourselves that we are talking to an audience of one on a medium built for billions, that we can forget that we are leaving a trail of words for strangers to someday stumble upon and read out of context.
Surely, there are words that should be shared with the world. I am forever grateful that writers like Abigail Thomas, for example, decided to put her very personal stories into print so that I could experience them. They changed my world. But when you are publishing a book — the kind you can hold in your hands — you never forget who your audience is. There are no “blurry edges” that make us lose sight of the fact that we might be communicating with the world. I guess maybe it all goes back to intentionality, and at the end of the day, I have no one to blame but myself if I lose sight of the fact that these words are not just available to you and you alone.
It is possible I am just reacting to a New York Times story I read today about how much parents are failing their children by sharing their kids’ lives online. I have written quite a bit here about Jonah, who is just old enough to raise fascinating questions and just young enough for them to be deliciously earnest and tender. Will some future version of him feel betrayed that you and I publicly pondered his grappling with the Easter Bunny? I wonder if maybe turning these letters into a physical book and taking them offline when the year is done would somehow make things feel slightly more private somehow? I’m not sure; it’s something to consider in the weeks and months ahead.
It could just be my mood on this Thursday evening. I feel decidedly tired of my own words tonight, physically exhausted from the ideas bouncing in my head on repeat, frenetically trying to connect more dots until it all forms into some grand equation about life, technology, and work. I wrote last week about how sometimes if I’m really mulling something, I cannot turn it off, even to the point where I am sometimes not fully present in moments with the people I love most. This is not a good thing.
So tonight, I am powering down that particular line of thinking. Maybe I will turn back to those thoughts someday and write them up, maybe I won’t. But for now, I’m turning it off.
Last night while Bill was making dinner and the boys were playing, I sat down on the couch by the big windows in our living room next to our dog, Marlowe. He was staring out the window like he often does, watching for serious threats like Amazon deliveries or neighbors walking dogs, his chin resting on the back edge of the couch. I sat down next to him and started to pet him, staring into his eyes and seeing my own reflection within them. The sun was beating through the windows, and his body was warm. After looking at me for awhile while I petted his cheeks and chin, he slowly closed his eyes. It struck me how, without saying a word, he had communicated to me. By closing his eyes at that moment, he told me he trusted me. I already knew this, of course, but it was nice to be reminded that he feels so safe. It was also nice to be reminded that words are not the only way (and maybe not even the best way) to express what you know and feel.
And with that, I will close this laptop for the evening and look forward to reading your words tomorrow.
Yours,
Sarah
Friday June 7 2019
Dear Sarah,
I’ve been thinking all week about our letters last week, and your letter considering my letter of the week before (our letters seem to land in two-week cycles in a way, where each of us is able to respond to the prior week’s letter and to pose new thoughts — I find myself wanting to look back at a two-week block. And I think perhaps I did last week as well?)
I’ve been thinking more deeply about what I wrote in my letter of two weeks ago, to which you responded last week, about my tendency to put off the things I enjoy — and the way I framed it and you understood it, that I put off the things I enjoy so I can anticipate those things. I was thinking about this in conjunction with a conversation I had with M last night, where I brought up the fact that I’m hoping to apply to a writing program in the future, where I’d focus on writing, and start (or continue?) on a fresh version of the path I’ve been on since my earlier school and college days. And he had a bit of a thoughtful look, and he acknowledged that this is something I’ve been talking about for a long time, this wanting to be a writer. And there was the sense that I’ve been talking about it and not much has happened, perhaps. In some ways, that’s true. I’m not a published writer, I haven’t submitted pieces to publications or blogged or put my writing and words out in the world in much of a public way. I felt sad for a moment, and it also made me think about why things have looked like this: if I do care so much about writing, why is it taking so long to do something about it? And: what does it actually look like to do it — how many possible flavors of a writing life are there?
So, I was thinking together of my tendency to put off the good things, the things I want, and to do the things I have to do, even if those are the things I enjoy less. I was thinking about it as my tendency to get my house in order — figuratively and often literally — before I turn to the thing I want to do. As I was thinking about this, this morning, I actually was tidying up, making space in my new studio/office that is still full of boxes from our recent move, clearing the desk where I’ll work next to a new window. This sense I have of getting the house in order: it’s not only that this is typically women’s work, though that is part of it, the things around the actual house that need to get done to maintain the appearance of tidiness, that nothing has happened, that no dust or dirt ever settled, that no dishes were used, that no clothes were worn and dirtied. I by no means do everything in our home life, but by virtue of working from home, being at home during the day, I do many of these things, because otherwise I would also be here to see them collecting, piling up, staring me down, invading my visual spaces, lingering into our free weekend time when no one wants to do laundry or sweep the floors. When things look good, are tidy, the work is invisible, and then the question becomes — why not X else? Why haven’t I/you done X yet? It’s not a question asked directly; it’s indirect, from myself, from others. When the work that is done is invisible, then it is experienced as an emptiness, an absence; and then, why not all these other things?
I’ve come up from a family where my parents had some college education — my mother went back to school after my parents divorced, when my sister and I were young, to get an associate’s degree in a creative practice, Ceramics Technology; and my father took college photography and weaving courses and then worked for 33 years on an assembly line for Chrysler — and I’ve moved away from home, lived in the Arizona desert and in San Francisco, and traveled the world — and I am employed and employable, have reliable work through which I do write, channeling words into grants that help nonprofits do good things in the world for people — and I’ve gotten to a place in my life where I can max out my 401k contribution and be a part of purchasing a home — and this feels like a pinnacle of sorts. It sometimes feels invisible, because I now exist in a space where this is the normal way of being. I’ve moved up into a middle-class (even perhaps upper middle-class?) normal life and for all of us here on this plane, the question becomes, What else are you doing, why haven’t you done more?
Getting the house in order first is a hard habit to break, across the board, this pattern of work before pleasure, or even less-pleasant work before the pleasurable work, the work I want to be doing, the creative work that holds no guarantee of stability or a solid 401K investment. For me, in this life, those things had to come first. And over the last handful of years I’ve been growing and rebuilding my writing muscles, the writing habit. It just takes time. I’m approaching 40 and to me there is still plenty of time ahead — why not make a change, why not pursue the thing I want? Just because it hasn’t happened yet, doesn’t mean it can’t yet happen. I’ve built up this habit of waiting, being in training for the things I want to be doing, cultivating the long wait. You can get used to waiting for the things you want, and assuming you’ll be waiting yet longer. It can become a space of potential, converting something to be borne into some form of endurance. This life is now the reward: the paying job, the flexibility of working from home, the room to write. Interestingly, if I imagine myself through my parents’ eyes, their worlds, and their expectations, I am certain that for them, in my life, I am more than enough, and that every new thing I take on and accomplish is more icing on top.
I’m also thinking about your dad considering the idea that he didn’t have anything he was focused on achieving or looking forward to at this stage in his life. I’m curious if you’ve had a chance to talk to him more about this. I’m thinking about life stages and list-making and thinking about the sweet and interesting possibility that there could be a moment when you’ve effectively completed your list, and you’re “done.” I don’t mean that he’d be “done,” completely. But this sense that you could have a rich life full of everything you could have imagined across your various life stages, and that you’ve ticked off many meaningful things over time, doesn’t sound bad in and of itself. I can see exactly why it would be difficult, scary, possibly painful for you and your sister to hear this from your father. I wonder if he has new thoughts on it after having said it out loud and perhaps chewed on it a bit more? In theory he could start a new list of goals of complete novelty — classes he might want to take, skills he might want to build, trips he might want to make, flavors he might want to try, paintings he’d like to paint. In effect, he could start a second (or third, or fourth, or fifth) life full of new goals to be achieved. All of our goals are manufactured by us and those around us, anyway, they aren’t exactly real, right? No one has to do anything, if you look at it straight on, and yet we all do so much. I’m certain we’ve talked about this before — enjoying the doing versus the achievement of the goal — and perhaps we are different on this count, though perhaps we aren’t. It seems thoroughly possible to enjoy a meta-layer of existence of setting goals, then pursuing and finishing them so you have room to set new ones. The list can be as long (or short) as you possibly want to make it!
This letter has gone on about as long as I should make it this week, so I’ll stop there for now! Until next week!
Your friend,
Eva